Household food waste collections guide section 3: How much food waste can be collected for recycling?

Participation in household food waste collections typically is lower than participation in other recycling services.

The perception that food waste recycling is both smelly and messy, the so called ‘yuk’ factor (outlined in detail in Section 2: Householder perceptions), is a barrier limiting participation in a food waste collection.

This section describes the factors that influence and dictate how much food waste is likely to be collected for recycling by a household food waste collection. It lists indicative yields for the different collection profiles used to collect household food waste and presents a formula to calculate the likely yield of food waste that local authorities might expect their service to achieve.